On March 19, 2020, the Princess Cruise Line ship Ruby Princess arrived in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and disembarked 2,700 passengers. These passengers included those who had been isolated in their cabins with fever. Roughly 2,000 of the passengers had been swabbed for coronavirus but were allowed to leave before the test results were available.
Within two months, COVID-19 infections associated with passengers from Ruby Princess became the largest coronavirus cluster outside of Wuhan, China, with at least 662 cases of the virus and 22 known deaths. Additional cases may have been spread internationally by 900 passengers from countries other than Australia who left Sydney after the ship docked.
Why were so many passengers allowed to disembark without test results? It now appears that a senior Australian Border Force (ABF) officer confused the results for flu tests with those for the coronavirus. He mistakenly believed passengers displaying “flu-like symptoms” had tested negative to COVID-19, when they had instead only tested negative for the common flu.
ABC Australia reports that that Border Force command only realized the mistake more than 30 hours after passengers — including 13 who had been isolated in their cabins with fever — had left the ship.
The new revelations contradict previous statements by the Border Force that NSW Health was responsible for allowing passengers to disembark.
ABC Australia also reports that when the ship docked at Sydney’s Overseas Passenger Terminal at 2:29am on March 19, NSW Health had already decided it would not attend dockside. The day before, an NSW Health panel had rated the ship as “low risk,” a conclusion it now admits was a tragic mistake.
Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.
We are after all. All human, destined to make mistakes.
As Willy says, and as well we’re all slow on the uptake in some ways.
What urgency did the ABF officer enjoy in terms of support to get him up to speed on distinguishing what he was looking for? There was a huge lag in comprehension of this threat from top to bottom.
“Everything seems fine. Let’s not get too excited.” Perfectly true of standing in a fresh cloud of radioactive fallout and perfectly true of this. We’re not good at dealing with invisible threats, and it takes a lot of correctly communicated information to override that fault. And that takes time.
In many ways a perfect storm to batter our cognition, test it beyond failure.
The new revelations contradict previous statements by the Border Force that NSW Health was responsible for allowing passengers to disembark
Sort of — if the Border Force thought that the tests were for COVID-19, then they would think that is was NSW Health that got it wrong.
August 3 2020: I have just read that a Norwegian cruise ship has 41 cases of Covid19 because of ‘procedural errors’. Unbelievable. Just the sort of news that is likely to be the last nail in the coffin of the industry.
Re the Norwegian ship, the guests were allowed to disembark and disperse.
Human nature means some things are not practically possible even as imagining relentlessly perfect discipline fools us into thinking they are. Such as: safely operating cruise ships at this time.